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The Teach For America Gospel

Olivia Blanchard served in Teach For America, but washed out after a classroom full of malcontents defeated her. Excerpts: The truth was, the five-week training program had not prepared me adequately. During my training, I taught a group of nine well-behaved third-graders who had failed the state reading test and hoped to make it to […]

Olivia Blanchard served in Teach For America, but washed out after a classroom full of malcontents defeated her. Excerpts:

The truth was, the five-week training program had not prepared me adequately.

During my training, I taught a group of nine well-behaved third-graders who had failed the state reading test and hoped to make it to fourth grade. Working with three other corps members, which created a generous teacher-student ratio, I had ample time for one-on-one instruction.

That classroom training was completely unlike the situation I now faced in Atlanta: teaching math and science to two 20-person groups of rotating, difficult fifth-graders—fifth-graders so difficult that multiple substitute teachers would vow never to teach fifth grade at our school again.

I had few insights or resources to draw on when preteen boys decided recess would be the perfect opportunity to beat each other bloody, or when parents all but accused me of being racist during meetings. Or when a student told me that his habit of doing nothing during class stemmed from his (admittedly sound) logic that “I did the same thing last year and I passed.” The Institute’s training curriculum was far too broad to help me navigate these situations. Because many corps members do not receive their specific teaching assignments until after training has ended, the same training is given to future kindergarten teachers in Atlanta, charter-school teachers in New Orleans, and high-school physics teachers in Memphis.

I was not alone in my trouble with student behavior. Gary Rubinstein, a 1991 TFA alum and an outspoken critic of the organization, believes the training sets teachers up for failure: TFA teachers “don’t know how to deal with discipline problems, because they’ve never dealt with a class with more than 10 kids—there’s no way to deal with so many potential problems when they’ve never been practiced.”

This could well be the heart of the problem:

In the weeks between accepting the offer to join TFA and the start of our training, I was told by e-mail that “as a 2011 corps member and leader, you have a deep personal and collective responsibility to ground everything you do in your belief that the educational inequality that persists along socioeconomic and racial lines is both our nation’s most fundamental injustice and a solvable problem. This mindset,” I was reminded, “is at the core of our Teach For America—Metro Atlanta Community.”

What makes the problem “solvable” through the efforts of TFA? A conviction that the problem is one of improving teaching techniques. A TFA teacher is doomed to fail if she is not allowed to consider the possibility that kids in her classroom aren’t achieving because they come out of home lives of chaos and desperation. Blanchard doesn’t mention this, but it’s implicit in this bit from her piece:

 When I was once asked to fill in for an unexpectedly absent colleague, one of her second-graders chose to confide in me about his abysmal home life. He explained, with wide and trusting eyes, that his mother’s boyfriend enjoyed getting drunk, abusing the family, and sometimes shooting at the kids with a BB gun for fun. I immediately reported the incident to an administrator, who reacted with what appeared to be annoyance that one more paper had to be filed at 3:00 p.m. on a Friday. This was an administrator who really does care about children and wants to improve their lives—but the all-important duty of covering the legal interests of the district can make crucial social work feel like just another rubber stamp.

Read the whole thing. What if the problem TFA identifies is not solvable by outside intervention? What then? Education reformers often get angry at people who ask that question, because they think it implies indifference to the plight of these kids. But indignation doesn’t pacify those classrooms and turn them into places where kids learn.

 

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